Using Regex to Build a Chrome Extension and Prank a Friend

Regular expressions for fun and profit

I used a chrome extension to prank a friend. It was a lot of fun!

Turns out, if you want to ruin a friends weekend and learn a thing or two about developing your own chrome extension, quite a bit.

Chrome Extensions

You can find a tutorial here to get you up and running. The nice girls and boys over at Google have made it really easy to get started writing your own extensions. If you have experience with CSS and javascript, you’ll find this a pretty natural extension (har-har) of those skills.

As you’ll note in the tutorial, it’s also pretty easy to install. Just go into the browser extensions tab. Then click the developer tab. At this point, you can just drag and drop the source folder over. It’ll install and turn on the extension automatically.

So the prank was largely as follows:

Hide folder full of code (which you can find here!) in friend’s documents.

Drag and drop folder in the extension tab.

Wait for your friend to google ‘League of Legends’ to find it replaced with ‘Timewasting Olympics’.